What You Measure is What You Get.

Einstein :
Not everything that can be counted counts.
And not everything that counts can be counted.

About me.

I know enough to know that at 04.00am it gets dark out on the streets. It has done this for the last twenty odd years, to my knowledge and will probably continue for the forseeable future. At some stage in this ‘future’ I shall retire and probably won’t give a damn if it still gets dark at 04.00am. Until then I shall be out there, somewhere, lurking in the shadows because someone, somewhere will be doing stuff they shouldn’t and then, well then I will introduce myself. In the meanwhile I shall try to remain sane and remember why I joined in the first place and try to ignore all the people who piss me off by making the job more complicated than it should be.

Opinions

Any opinions contained in posts are mine and mine alone. Many of them will not be those of any Police Force, Police Organisation or Police Service around this country. The opinions are based on many years of working within the field of practical operational Police work and reflect the desire to do things with the minimum of interference by way of duplication for the benefit of others who themselves do not do the same job. I recognise that we all perform a wide range of roles and this is essential to make the system work. If you don’t like what you see remember you are only one click on the mouse away from leaving. I accept no responsibility for the comments left by others.

Recent Comments

C.T.C. Constabulary.

A Strategic Community Diversity Partnership.
We are cutting bureaucracy and reducing the recording of target and monitoring related statistics.
Our senior leaders will drive small, economical cars from our fleet surplus to save money to invest in better equipment for our frontline response officers.
We are investing money to reinstate station canteens for the benefits of those 24/7 response officers.
We have a pursuit policy. The message is that if you commit an offence and use a vehicle, we will follow you and stop you if necessary. It is your duty to stop when the lights and sirens are on.
We take account of the findings of the Force questionnaire and are reducing the administration and management levels and returning these officers to frontline response duties.
We insist on a work-life balance.
We have no political masters.
We are implimenting selection processes that take account of an individuals skills and proven abilities for the job. Our senior leaders will have one foot in reality and still possess the operational Policing skills they have long forgotton about and seldom used. All ranks are Police Officers first and specialists second.
We will impliment career development and performance evaluation monitoring of our leaders by those officers who operate under that leadership.
The most important role is that of Constable. All other roles are there to positively support the role and the responsibility of Constable and the duties performed.

Whichendbites

“We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising. It can be a wonderful method of creating the illusion of progress while creating confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.”......Petronius

Just so.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

Reality.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Rank V’s Responsibility

Don't confuse your idea of how important you are with the responsibility of your role.

Meetings.

If you had to identify, in one word, why we will never achieve our full potential, Meetings would be that word.

There is always a bigger picture.

When there is no answer to your problem, there is always deflection from the need to justify giving an answer.

Well the kids arrived from schools all over the County to see the brave boys and girls from the emergency services doing their bit at the County Emergency Services open day. Good for citizen focus and promoting the brand within the realms of those we can impress with our own style of portrayal of what we do in our efforts to make our part of the world a little bit safer for the population.

With members from the public service family strutting their stuff, the ambulance service, the fire service, search and rescue and various departments from the Policing fraternity putting on a show of truly momentous proportions to fly the flag and show exactly how good we are. Great entertainment for the kids, a break for the teachers and our talents embedded into a section of the community for all the right reasons. Its funny how many Police officers are happy to leave the security of their offices to come along and do their bit for the community in these circumstances without the risk of having to get involved in anything too risky, not even playing a bag snatcher. More of that later.

The kids enjoyed the large fires, marvelled at the arrival, with all horns blazing, of the Fire Service and I must say that the plumes of smoke as the fires were extinguished was truly impressive.

Kids, being kids, seemed to enjoy all the exciting and gory stuff far more than the entertaining but informative stuff. A great narrative by the presenter describing how the exciting stuff happens, when it happens, is far more focus holding than the safety first but essentially boring things like how to approach a fire, or a good bandaging technique. These things were lost once the real good things started to happen. Out with the boys toys to cut the top off a car, the ambulance evacuation of a heavily injured casualty (obviously simulated, blood and all, I hope) and the Police car chase around the large arena. All very exciting.

Not, however, as exciting as someone’s sniffer dog pissing on one of the brigade’s displays causing a large degree of cheering. After all they were only going to set fire to it so it didn’t matter. All of this was a mere trifle compared to the sight of a canine hot footing in pursuit of the handbag snatcher who had, by prior arrangement of course, robbed a lady teacher of her handbag and foolishly run off across the large open arena in an effort to escape the clutches of the good guys. Like a cartoon exaggeration of the archetypal pantomime baddie, the boo’s soon evaporated into muted cheers of expectation. Something was going to happen, these kids are not stupid. The National Curriculum must be working.

Enter stage left, trusty Police Dog handler, like some super hero but without the cape or underpants on the outside, large dog accompanied by even larger crown anticipation. The level of cheering increasing in a crescendo to match the closing gap between dog and bag snatcher, followed in due course by canine affixing to a body part of bag snatcher followed by enormous applause as bag snatcher hits the ground in a crumpled heap with canine on top of him. The mad man with the rather large and threatening stick got a great ovation, but only when submerged under 100lbs of determined canine attitude. I wonder how many sanctioned detections or at least NFA’s we might be able to get out of this lot ?

Give’em action every time. They can sit on bikes or in cars, climb ladders and try on helmets, they can talk on radios or be taken for a quick but safe spin in the trucks, turn on the horns and lights but nothing, and I mean nothing, nothing goes down better than one of the dogs chasing and nailing the fugitive. No amount of talking has the same effect. If only everything in life was this simple, the world would be a far better place. We were cooking, and the first bite is with the eye, as it were.

In addition to the above, the CTC Constabulary, in true Police Dogs tradition, is hosting the 15th No12 Region Dogs trials with competitors from Ruralshire Constabulary, Blandshire Constabulary and it is expected that PC Plod will be the only entrant from the Northern Sector or the Region in attendance. I haven’t had a reply from BP so don’t know if any representative will be coming from there.This is as long as they are free from all their excessive form filling and target hitting. It could be embarrassing with just the three of us but at least we can keep all the trophies. We will be doing the stuff at the weekend so there will be plenty of space to park in the car park. The budget has been cut for this so we will have to bring our own packed lunches and drinks for the dogs.